Google Reader, YouTube, Revver, and 10 Ideas — TDC Preseason Week 4

The reason for this preseason is to prepare you with the tools and let you get started upfront so you don’t have to take the steeper learning curve when the actual Thirty Day Challenge IV is started in August 2008.

What you will see during preseason is nothing compared to the real TDC. In recent weeks, you are just getting the basics on how to use the tools, not the marketing or business aspects.

In Thirty Day Challenge, you are going to build a real business. It can be hard to learn how to use the tools and the other aspects of them simultaneously.

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Here are more tips to help you get the most from (and become more productive in) TDC. The TDC forum has an RSS feed, so you can grab that to your Google Reader and get updates as new posts become available.

Tips:If you don’t want to track the whole forum, you can switch to a sub-forum and get the RSS feed for that sub-forum only.

Getting People into the Thirty Day Challenge

The Google Reader video, which is part of Week 4 videos, is a great way to have people interested in Thirty Day Challenge. Everybody likes it. It allows you to filter information and participate in the information age effectively. Being able to look through the blog posts, just the headlines, is just fantastic. Imagine having 60 posts in one feed.

This makes the headline or blog post title very important, which brings us to Twitter. You need to follow Ed Dale on Twitter. If you message him with @Ed_Dale, he often will direct message you back to avoid cluttering his message list and spamming other followers with inappropriate message.

During the TDC, you will learn how to use Twitter for the team, marketing and do it in a way that is very ethical and respectful to the system and the community.

Firefox Sets a New Download Record

During June 2008, Firefox 3 has set a record of about 8 million downloads. That is a proof that product launch still works. One particularly interesting and cool technique during that launch was that they actually have people fill out commitment forms.

If you read Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini, you should know that getting a pre-commitment like that is extraordinarily powerful, sort of a psychological trigger.

During the same month, Flock also launched a beta version that is based on Firefox 3.0 code. The reason TDC recommends Flock is to come up with sort of a standard browser so everyone can follow along.

It is fine if you want to use Firefox, Opera or Safari, but there should be a baseline to make sure than nobody is left behind. Every time you make a presumption about something, you leave somebody behind.

Flock has also released a newer stable version of the browser, but what TDC will use is Flock 1.2.1 (it’s the official browser for TDC). As long as it gets the job done, go for your favorite browser.

Ed and a few other TDC forum members have installed Flock 2.0 beta and up until this point they don’t have any problem with it. The only extension that has a problem is PicLens, but that is not required in TDC.

Sign Up and Use with YouTube

Registering a YouTube account is necessary to have personalized features. If you are heading down the Apple TV or TiVo path, or any of those that play YouTube video, that will be possible only with an account.

Every YouTube account has a homepage, which is youtube.com/<username>.

You can see the yellow subscribe button in both the user homepage and individual video page. That means every time there is a new video posted from this particular username, you will see it on your page.

Another neat feature worth mentioning is Favorite section. If you mark a video as Favorite, it will appear in Apple TV. YouTube has also enabled a high quality version of the video so you can have a better experience with it on your screen or Apple TV.

If you are in a homepage of a YouTube user (Ed’s YouTube homepage is http://www.youtube.com/eddale), you will be able to subscribe to the RSS feed from the orange icon next to the address bar of your Flock browser.

Thirty Day Challenge is Also Available in Revver and Other Video Sites

Newbie is the highest rank of all in Thirty Day Challenge. It is what TDC is all about.

If you go to Revver, you also can view all the videos from TDC. Moreover, you can download the video in Flash or QuickTime format.

For people who are in the country who ban YouTube, Revver and other video sites can be an option. TDC videos are everywhere. Indeed, you will find it in iTunes. (Details will be revealed later.)

Part of what is going to be talked about is a tool that allows you to distribute videoc content throughout the Internet.

Revver actually has better quality video, but you can also use the high quality link in YouTube.

Getting of Ideas

Now is a good time to put your marketing radar and consider what you might looking at inside the Thirty Day Challenge.

There is no excuse to not have ideas. There are millions of ways to get ideas.

Have a look at businesses. The best successful business / site has come from somebody who observed in real life the idea and actually brought it online. Small businesses are doing extremely well in last year TDC. So, if you already have a small business, perhaps you are already half way there.

However, if you don’t, maybe there are small businesses in your community who are willing to be taken as a test for this challenge.

Again, small businesses, artists, musicians, people who are creating things are very successful in Thirty Day Challenge. So if you have friends or anyone who are in those categories, please consider inviting them into TDC. They may as well turn their passion into a business.

Artists are so focus on getting good on what you do, but none of them have been taught about the right way to approach marketing.

Find yourself a book of some kind, perhaps a Moleskine. You can use the book for visual thinking and jot down ideas. Aim for 10 ideas. They don’t have to be good ones. You have to suspend judgment.

One of the worse things we’re taught in schools, which is a horrific crime in and of itself, is to edit as soon as we have the idea. You should keep idea generation and editing completely separate.

Neil Strauss, Stephen King, Hemingway, and most popular writers don’t edit when they write. It doesn’t matter if it is not good, even if it is just to fix spelling mistakes, don’t do it. You need to get into the flow.

The way to brilliance is to have a lot of ideas. Digital photography is a perfect example. The secret to take great photos is to take lots of them and then delete. Digital camera makes this possible.

If you can get into the habit, your creativity will just go to the roof. Ed recommends a book titled Software for Your Brain by Michael A. Hewitt-Gleeson. The core idea inside the book is brilliant.

To wrap up, this week challenge is to come up with ten ideas.

All existing participants are in the running of winning prizes, including a cool vehicle. Dan and Ed are going to hold a conference in United States in October. It is not for beginners, but for Internet marketers. Successful 30DC winner will be given a slot to that event as well.